Singapore dominates the global discussion of sidewalk cuisine, but it doesn't even serve food on the street. Are its hawker centers really a garden of eatin'?

**Ask anybody what's good about Singapore and they'll almost certainly mention the street food, or "hawker food" as it's known. Sure, your world-traveler friends might knock the city-state's preponderance of giant malls (does a Prada store really need a velvet rope?) or its general glitziness, but almost everyone agrees that Singapore's 100-plus hawker centers are a reason to visit. These usually open-air food-courts-of-sorts ensure that a cheap, delicious meal is usually nearby, and thanks to the melting-pot population--of Malays, Chinese, and Indians, among others--they offer a seemingly limitless variety of dishes.

As a result, Singapore has developed a reputation as a street food mecca. The culmination of this was last week's inaugural World Street Food Congress, but the status has been building for years, cultivated by a well-funded tourism board that regularly flies out journalists (including this one) to chow their way through the best eats, and by Makansutra, the 16-year-running website and series of guidebooks dedicated to Singapore hawker fare (it's also the organization behind the WSFC). There's just one problem: None of Singapore's "street food" is actually served on the street.

My favorite street food city might be Bangkok, which has carts seemingly everywhere; or maybe Penang, Malaysia, where you can close your eyes, pick a stall, and tuck into possibly the best noodles you've ever eaten. Eating on the street in these places is always an experience. There's the ephemeral nature of many vendors, who might be there Tuesday but not Monday, and possibly only until 10:45 a.m., or whenever they run out of food. And there's the setting: You're often right on the sidewalk or very near it--sometimes plopped down "on a low plastic stool with Vietnamese riding by on their motorbikes," as headliner Anthony Bourdain rhapsodized last week at the WSFC.

I may be able to find satay skewers in Singapore as tasty as the ones in Penang, but the hawker-center experience lacks the side of chaos I (and many others) crave in my street food. You might not know it, but Singapore used to have that. As former public health commissioner Daniel Wang recounted during his WSFC presentation, Chinatown once had food vendors all over the streets. Then the government intervened in the early 1970s and began building hawker centers to give these itinerant cooks a permanent home.

As Wang (who, intriguingly, was also the man who banned chewing gum in Singapore) tells it, the main reason to get vendors off the streets was concern for the city-state's waterways. It was "better to move them to where they had proper water and weren't throwing wastewater directly into drains, where they'd have electricity for refrigeration," he said. Another former government official, Simon Tay, recalled, "We created the hawker centers because we thought unsanitary conditions would create mass health scares." Yikes.

Though the terms "hawker food" and "street food" are often used interchangeably, no one in Singapore is trying to pull a fast one and claim to be like Bangkok. Wang admits that "you can't really call [vendors] street hawkers, because they're no longer operating on the streets." But he finds this detail irrelevant: "They are very much selling the same food."

That's a point Makansutra founder (and WSFC organizer)KF Seetoh emphasizes. "Street food is a cuisine, not a physicality," he insisted. When I approached him after a panel to press the question, "Isn't something lost when you move street food off the streets?," he seemed impatient: "You are romanticizing it. Do you want to get food poisoning?"

I don't want to get food poisoning, of course. But I haven't yet, and I've eaten street food in at least 15 countries (pro tip: simply scope out how clean the "kitchen" and the condiments look). Hawker center food tastes good, sure, but I still have the mindset that it's somehow watered down, inferior. At least Bourdain seems to agree. At the opening press conference for the WSFC, he told assembled media that yes, "The setting changes the flavor" of food. And Saveur's editor in chief,James Oseland, who was also a speaker, waxed about "the accidental gorgeousness of street food." These other Americans get it, I think.

I was therefore surprised, when it was Bourdain's turn to give a keynote address the next morning, to hear him opine that while he himself is "not concerned about hygiene" (see!), "Singapore has shown the way for places where hygiene and regulation are serious concerns, like New York." And then visiting food experts from other countries started to express their admiration for the model.

William Wongso, a well-known Indonesian chef and TV personality, lamented that "Indonesian street food is not yet foreigner-friendly. The government has not done anything to build hawker centers." Plus, crummy conditions for vendors means the younger generation isn't interested in making street food, he says.Vo Quoh, a chef and food-magazine editor from Vietnam, talked about how police crackdowns mean the country is losing 10 to 15 typical streetside dishes a year. "I have asked the government to create more sanitary conditions for street food vendors," he said through a translator.

So, maybe the dialogue around street food is not so much a contest of what's better--Singapore's hawker center model or willy-nilly roadside grub a la Saigon--but a question of how to best guarantee these foods' longevity. As cities worldwide continue to modernize and become more global, letting vendors sling sandwiches from non-permitted carts that sit all day in the sun may not be the best way forward. A little refrigeration, running water, and some shade (but please, hold the air-conditioning!) could be better for eaters and cooks.

In an ideal world, some of us who love street food would see it carry on indefinitely on in its haphazard fashion, with a soundtrack of honking horns and background of exhaust fumes. But that might not be realistic. Bourdain pointed out that "if you wanted to create an homage to a pho stand in New York City, it would cost a few hundred thousand dollars in legal fees for the right to put out a few little plastic tables." It's laughable to imagine, but he's probably correct. Then he conceded, "The hawker center is the most realistic model." Others echo the sentiment that a hawker center is not exactly street food, but it's the pragmatic solution. "It's something in between," Tay, the former government official, told me.

I left Singapore the evening the WSFC's two days of "dialogues" ended, gnawed at by an intense char kway teow craving and the notion that maybe I'd been thinking about things wrong. What both Singaporeans and representatives from other countries seemed to agree on was that a hawker center isn't exactly street food, but it's a good compromise. It allows governments to regulate hygiene, something that (unfortunately, in my opinion) governments tend to be pretty insistent about. It also offers better conditions for vendors, which makes a career of selling soup a more attractive option to the younger generation. It allows vendors to operate during inclement weather. And hey, it's better than a mall food court!

Of course, the hawker center is not the only solution. Different models work for different cities. Food carts have successfully colonized Portland, OR (the topic of one "dialogue" at the WSFC), and trucks offering all manner of delicious grub popped up in New York a few years ago. I don't want to see Saigon's street vendors shoved into sterile brick-and-mortar complexes that stifle their charm, and I wouldn't want to see this in Bangkok, either (something that's unlikely anyway, given the cost of land, as chef Ian Kittichai rightly pointed out to me). But even worse would be to see iconic foods die off.

With that in mind, discussions like these, and examinations of models that are working reasonably well--such as Singapore's hawker centers or Portland's food carts--do seem like the place to start. Particularly for countries like Indonesia, India, and Vietnam, which, as representatives at the WSFC attested, are struggling with questions of how to preserve their street food. As for whether hygiene-concerned cities like New York might eventually introduce hawker center-type establishments, as Bourdain imagines, it's hard to say. All I want is for us to reach the point where I can head out my door and land a plate of cheap, freshly made char kway teow. As long as it's nearby, whether on the sidewalk or in a hawker center, I'll be happy.

Jenny Miller is a Manhattan-based food and travel journalist. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, Saveur.com, Food Republic, BBC Travel online, Time Out New York, Ladies' Home Journal, and the New York Post, Portland Oregonian, and Austin American-Statesman newspapers, among others.